Bisexual former AFL player Mitch Brown is swapping the footy field for a very different kind of contact sport in the new music video from Australian pop artist ANDY.
Brown, who made history in 2025 as the first current or former male AFL player to come out publicly as bisexual, stars as ANDY’s love interest in the video for “Can’t Wait”.
The clip leans hard into the physicality of Australian sport — sweat, tackles, locker rooms and bodies colliding — before turning that familiar imagery into an openly queer romance.
Also appearing is rugby league legend Ian Roberts, who became the first high-profile Australian professional footballer to come out publicly as gay in 1995.
Together, their presence gives the video a distinctly queer sporting lineage.
‘There’s A Nice Full-Circle Feeling’
For Brown, filming romantic scenes on a football field carried particular weight.
During his decade-long AFL career with the West Coast Eagles, he has said he spent years carefully monitoring how he spoke and behaved because he feared what teammates might assume about his sexuality.
Now, things look very different.
“I spent so much of my playing career being conscious of what I said, how I behaved and what people might assume about me,” Brown told Rolling Stone Australia.
“And now I’m on a footy field — although a different code — kissing another man for a music video.”
“There’s a nice full-circle feeling to that.”
It is difficult to imagine a clearer visual contrast with the closeted environment Brown has previously described.
Reimagining Australian Footy
Rather than treating queerness as something separate from sport, Can’t Wait deliberately places it at the centre.
The video plays with the aggression, intimacy and physical closeness that already exist in contact sport, asking why those same gestures suddenly become uncomfortable for some audiences when desire between men is made explicit.
ANDY says the romantic scenes with Brown created an immediate reaction on set.
“Honestly, when we filmed them and watched it back for the first time, you could hear a pin drop,” he said.
“I think everyone could feel that we were commenting on something very real, very raw and very beautiful.”
The result is part music video, part queer sports fantasy and part commentary on the narrow ideas of masculinity that have long surrounded Australian football codes.
Brown’s Coming-Out Changed AFL History
Brown played 94 AFL games for West Coast between 2007 and 2016.
When he came out publicly as bisexual in August 2025, he became the first male player in AFL history — current or retired — to openly identify as gay or bisexual.
Brown later spoke about hearing homophobic comments during his playing career and said fear around sexuality shaped how he behaved inside football environments.
His decision to come out was widely welcomed by LGBTQ+ advocates and people within the sport.
Since then, Brown has increasingly used his platform to challenge the idea that queer identities and elite sport are somehow incompatible.
Appearing in Can’t Wait takes that message somewhere more playful.
Instead of discussing queer inclusion from the sidelines, he is quite literally putting queer desire onto the field.
Ian Roberts Joins The Line-Up
The appearance of Ian Roberts gives the video another layer of significance.
Roberts came out publicly as gay in 1995 while playing professional rugby league, at a time when doing so carried considerable personal and professional risk.
More than three decades later, he remains an important figure in LGBTQ+ sporting history.
Putting Roberts and Brown in the same video connects two generations of queer Australian athletes — one who broke an enormous barrier in the 1990s and another who made AFL history 30 years later.
The imagery may be sweaty and sexy, but the point underneath it is straightforward.
Queer people have always existed in sport.
Can’t Wait simply makes them impossible to miss.
